IT Industry News June 2013

This is my 30,000 foot look at events in the ICT industry forJune 2013. What you see here is a précis of the monthly report I produce, which will be available in more detail at the News section of the Eagle website, where you will also find back issues.

A Little History of June in previous years …

In June 2008 the economy was rocked by high oil prices, the fallout from the sub debt crisis and signs of inflation. The big deal saw the Carlyle Group buy the US Government business of Booz Allen Hamilton for $2.54 billion. Nokia paid $410 million to complete its ownership of Symbian; NEC bought Nutcracker for $300 million; Cogeco bought Toronto Hydro Telecom for $200 million; Progress paid $162 million for Iona; Barracuda Networks offered $186 million for Sourcefire and Belden paid $133 million for Trapeze Networks. Four years ago in June 2009Intel paid $884 million for Wind River Systems and Nokia Siemens took advantage of the fire-sale at Nortel, picking up their CDMA and LTE assets for $650 million. June 2010 was a slow month in M&A but Canadian data centre company Fusepoint was snapped up by Savvis for $135 million; Twitter bought SmallThought Systems; and IBM bought Coremetrics. In June 2011 the big deal of the month was Ericsson’s $1.5 Billion purchase of Tecordia; Oracle made a couple of acquisitions (storage vendor Pillar Data and Fatwire Software); Google also made a couple of acquisitions, (analytics company PostRank and advertising management company Admeld). Last year in June 2012Microsoft’s $1.2 billion purchase of Yammer was the big deal of the month. Salesforce paid $689 million for Buddy Media; Google reputedly paid $100 million for Meebo; Facebook bought facial recognition company Face.com; and Oracle bought “social intelligence” company Collective Intellect. Another “buy” of interest to us at Eagle was the reputedly 7 figure purchase of Bullhorn by Vista Equity Partners (Bullhorn is Eagle’s front office software).

Which brings us back to the present …

June 2013 saw Salesforce.com’s $2.5 billion purchase of marketing technology company ExactTarget as the big buy of the month. Other acquisitions saw Irish mobile company Three pay $780 million for O2 Ireland; SanDisk paid $307 million for SMART Storage Systems; Cisco bought Composite Software for $180 million; IBM bought cloud company SoftLayer Technologies; and Buytopia.ca has been on a spree with six acquisitions in the last year.

There was news of layoffs at struggling social networking games company Zynga with 500 people losing their jobs, Symantec are apparently letting go of 1,700 people and IBM is letting 1,300 staff go.

Some interesting surveys, reports and tidbits in the news suggest three quarters of executives around the world would be willing to change jobs today, another report out of the US says that 55% of workers are interested in changing careers (I was thinking professional soccer player!). About 70% of Canadian companies have suffered some kind of cyber attack in the last year … it is getting crazy out there! Generally the indicators were positive in both the US and Canada with expectations of improvement in the economy, good news on the jobs front and an optimism amongst business owners. An interesting report from BMO suggests that Montreal will add 90,000 jobs over the next three years.

That’s what caught my eye over the last month, the full edition will be available soon on the Eagle website. Hope this was useful and I’ll be back with the July 2012 industry news in just about a month’s time.